The Leopard

by

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

Tancredi, the Prince of Falconeri, is the Prince of Salina’s nephew. He’s the son of the Prince’s sister and a spendthrift father who died when Tancredi was 14. Tancredi is now the Prince’s ward, and the Prince loves him like a son, even wishing that Tancredi could be his heir. Tancredi has a lively and fun-loving personality marked by occasional seriousness. He joins Garibaldi’s rebel Red Shirts and sustains a mild injury at the battle of Palermo. After that, he fights for Victor Emmanuel’s Piedmontese (Italian) army. At the convent in Donnafugata, he makes a veiled, fumbling attempt to propose to Concetta, which she misunderstands and coldly rebuffs. After that, Tancredi turns his romantic attentions to the alluring Angelica Sedàra, who is richer than him despite a lack of noble blood. After the Prince arranges their marriage, Tancredi and Angelica enjoy a highly sensual engagement that actually proves to be the high point of their relationship, as their marriage is loveless and disappointing. However, by the time of the Prince’s death in 1888, Tancredi has built a successful political career. After Tancredi’s own death, Concetta learns that Tancredi always loved her.

Tancredi Falconeri Quotes in The Leopard

The The Leopard quotes below are all either spoken by Tancredi Falconeri or refer to Tancredi Falconeri. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cultural Survival and Decline Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1. Introduction to the Prince Quotes

The lad had one of those sudden serious moods which made him so mysterious and so endearing. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?”

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri (speaker), Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings: the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. […] He felt like saying to Russo, but his innate courtesy held him back, “I understand now; you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places. Gently, nicely, putting a few thousand ducats in your pockets meanwhile. […] For all will be the same. Just as it is now: except for an imperceptible shifting about of classes.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Don Ciccio Ferrara, Russo
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2. Donnafugata Quotes

The soul of the Prince reached out toward them, toward the intangible, the unattainable, which gave joy without laying claim to anything in return; as many other times, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a notebook for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out. “They’re the only really genuine, the only really decent beings,” thought he, in his worldly formulae. “Who worries about dowries for the Pleiades, a political career for Sirius, matrimonial joy for Vega?”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4. Love at Donnafugata Quotes

Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

Anyone deducing from this attitude of Angelica that she loved Tancredi would have been mistaken; she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love; […] but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing; his blue eyes, his affectionate teasing, certain suddenly serious tones of his voice gave her, even in memory, quite a definite turn, and in those days her one longing was to be gripped by those hands of his; presently she would forget them and find a substitute as she did, in fact, later, but for the moment she yearned for him to seize her.

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica […] But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success[.]

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5. Father Pirrone Pays a Visit Quotes

“It’s a class difficult to suppress because it’s in continual renewal and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. […] I say as before, because it’s differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble […] And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straightaway with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text

Related Characters: Father Pirrone (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra, Don Pietrino
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:

Two days later Father Pirrone left to return to Palermo. As he was jolted along he went over impressions that were not entirely pleasant; that brutish love affair come to fruition in St. Martin’s summer, that wretched half almond grove reacquired by means of calculated courtship, seemed to him the rustic poverty-stricken equivalent of other events recently witnessed. Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both around his little finger all the same.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Father Pirrone, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra, ‘Ncilina, Santino Pirrone, Turi Pirrone
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6. A Ball Quotes

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra, Princess Maria Stella
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8. Relics Quotes

Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these secondhand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride[.]

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina, Angelica Sedàra, Senator Tassoni
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis:
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Tancredi Falconeri Quotes in The Leopard

The The Leopard quotes below are all either spoken by Tancredi Falconeri or refer to Tancredi Falconeri. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cultural Survival and Decline Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1. Introduction to the Prince Quotes

The lad had one of those sudden serious moods which made him so mysterious and so endearing. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?”

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri (speaker), Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings: the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. […] He felt like saying to Russo, but his innate courtesy held him back, “I understand now; you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places. Gently, nicely, putting a few thousand ducats in your pockets meanwhile. […] For all will be the same. Just as it is now: except for an imperceptible shifting about of classes.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Don Ciccio Ferrara, Russo
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2. Donnafugata Quotes

The soul of the Prince reached out toward them, toward the intangible, the unattainable, which gave joy without laying claim to anything in return; as many other times, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a notebook for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out. “They’re the only really genuine, the only really decent beings,” thought he, in his worldly formulae. “Who worries about dowries for the Pleiades, a political career for Sirius, matrimonial joy for Vega?”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4. Love at Donnafugata Quotes

Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

Anyone deducing from this attitude of Angelica that she loved Tancredi would have been mistaken; she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love; […] but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing; his blue eyes, his affectionate teasing, certain suddenly serious tones of his voice gave her, even in memory, quite a definite turn, and in those days her one longing was to be gripped by those hands of his; presently she would forget them and find a substitute as she did, in fact, later, but for the moment she yearned for him to seize her.

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica […] But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success[.]

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5. Father Pirrone Pays a Visit Quotes

“It’s a class difficult to suppress because it’s in continual renewal and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. […] I say as before, because it’s differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble […] And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straightaway with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text

Related Characters: Father Pirrone (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra, Don Pietrino
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:

Two days later Father Pirrone left to return to Palermo. As he was jolted along he went over impressions that were not entirely pleasant; that brutish love affair come to fruition in St. Martin’s summer, that wretched half almond grove reacquired by means of calculated courtship, seemed to him the rustic poverty-stricken equivalent of other events recently witnessed. Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both around his little finger all the same.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Father Pirrone, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra, ‘Ncilina, Santino Pirrone, Turi Pirrone
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6. A Ball Quotes

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra, Princess Maria Stella
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8. Relics Quotes

Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these secondhand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride[.]

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina, Angelica Sedàra, Senator Tassoni
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis: